The Authors Guild, which
represents 8,000 authors in the United States, has filed a class-action
copyright infringement
lawsuit [PDF] against Google in the Southern District of New York because of
its Google Print program that makes books and other offline information
searchable online. Google has contracted with several public and university
libraries to create digital archives of the libraries' collections of books. The
suit alleges that by reproducing a copy of these works that are not in the
public domain, Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement. “This is a
plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said Authors Guild President Nick
Taylor. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful
owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

In a
first reaction, Google regrets "that this group chose to sue us over a
program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world --
especially since any copyright holder can
exclude their books from the program." Google also did point out, that its
programm "doesn’t show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books
through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show
more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term
appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online
booksellers and libraries."

September 21, 2005: Orlowski,
Andrew,
Authors sue Google, The Register:
"The Authors Guild, along with a former US poet laureate, is suing Google
for copyright infringement."

This article offers some perspectives on GPLP in
light of what is known about library print book collections in general, and
those of the Google 5 in particular, from information in OCLC's WorldCat
bibliographic database and holdings file. Questions addressed include:

Coverage: What proportion of the system-wide
print book collection will GPLP potentially cover? What is the degree of
holdings overlap across the print book collections of the five
participating libraries?

Language: What is the
distribution of languages associated with the print books held by the
GPLP libraries? Which languages are predominant?

Copyright: What proportion of
the GPLP libraries' print book holdings are out of copyright?

Works: How many distinct
works are represented in the holdings of the GPLP libraries? How does a
focus on works impact coverage and holdings overlap?

Convergence: What are the
effects on coverage of using a different set of five libraries? What are
the effects of adding the holdings of additional libraries to those of
the GPLP libraries, and how do these effects vary by library type?

October 2005

Five publishing houses -
McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education and Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and
John Wiley & Sons - file a suit in New York against Google Print.
Under the program, Google plans to scan and index
millions of copyrighted books taken from the collections of the three
universities Harvard, Stanford and Michigan. The suit seeks a declaration
that Google infringes on the publishers' copyrights when the Web search leader
scans entire books without permission of copyright owners (The Copyright Act
squarely puts the burden on Google to obtain permission to copy the books, and
not on the publisher to tell Google which particular titels ought not to be
copied). Google claims, that the scanning of the full text of the books is
necessary to create a searchable catalogue of the books located within the
libraries' collections. Only snippets of copyrighted
works will be available through the search engine. There are no plans to
make full copies of copyrighted works available without their owners' permission.

In September, the Authors Guild joined with three US writers - Herbert Mitgang,
Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman - to file a similar lawsuit. The Authors Guild
filing was a class-action lawsuit that seeks damages, the publishers' suit seeks
a declaration that Google is committing copyright infringement by scanning books.

October 20, 2005: Sherriff,
Lucy,
Publishers join forces to sue Google, The Register:
"The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is suing Google over its plans
to make scans of millions of books available online."

October 19, 2005: Italie,
Hillel,
Publishers Sue Google Over Scanning Plans, ABC News:
"Just weeks after a leading authors' organization sued Google for copyright
infringement, the Association of American Publishers has also filed suit
against the search engine giant's plans to scan and index books for the
Internet."

Author Meghann Marco: "Kinda
sucks for me, because not that many people know about my book and this might
help them find out about it. I fail to see what the harm is in Google
indexing a book and helping people find it. Anyone can read my book for free
by going to the library anyway." .... "I'm a book author. My publisher is
suing Google Print and that bothers me. I'd asked for my book to be included,
because gosh it's so hard to get people to read a book."

A letter
from the National Consumer League (NCL) calls for congressional hearings
on the matter: "In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate
Judiciary subcommittees overseeing intellectual property issues, the
nation's oldest consumer advocacy group raised concerns about a forthcoming
ambitious effort to catalogue the entire collections of four major American
libraries. The letter, signed by National Consumers League President Linda
Golodner, acknowledges the tremendous potential value in Google Inc.'s bold
vision for the new initiative, in which the complete collection of works at
the university libraries of Stanford, Michigan, and Harvard, and of the New
York Public Library, would be scanned and made available electronically to
the public. The Washington-based advocacy group warned, however, that the
project, which will resume scanning on November 1, 2005 poses
dramatic threats to the principle of copyrights; fairness to authors; and
cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship...We do not doubt
Google's good intentions," wrote Golodner. "But any database which
represents itself as being a 'full' or 'complete' record of American culture
as reflected in the collections of four major research libraries must, in
fact, be complete." Click to see copy of the letters: